A comparison of differential cross sections for inelastic scattering of 130 MeV positive and negative pions has been made for studying the giant resonance region in /sup 118/Sn and /sup 40/Ca. In addition, several of the low-lying collective states in each target were examined. Comparison to distorted wave impulse approximation calculations allowed collective deformation lengths ..beta..R and fractions of the energy-weighted sum rules to be extracted. For bound collective states, the strengths for ..pi../sup +/ and ..pi../sup -/ were nearly equal, as has been found for other scattering probes. Giant quadrupole and dipole excitations in /sup 40/Ca (T = 0) had nearly equal ..pi../sup +/ and ..pi../sup -/ sum rule strengths. Quadrupole and monopole excitations in /sup 118/Sn near 14 MeV show about twice the ..pi../sup -/ transition strengths compared to those for ..pi../sup +/, contrary to expectations from simple isoscalar models.